Digg Townhall: Lights! Camera! Cold Beer! Action!

Last night, a contingent of the Ustream.TV team was lucky enough to visit the Digg offices in San Francisco to set up the live stream for their first townhall. The blogsphere was buzzing up a blizzard for this momentous occasion, and sure enough, over 8,000 unique viewers (with up to 2,300 concurrent viewers) tuned in live for Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson’s hour+ session. Watch the archived replay here:

Kevin and Jay ran through the top 20 “dugg” questions, as submitted and voted by Diggers specifically for this event. They certainly didn’t shy away from any of the questions, announcing plenty of exciting upcoming product launches, readily acknowledging current shortcomings, and directly addressing (and debunking) the “blacklist” and auto-bury” rumors that had been flying around.

While there were plenty of product specific answers, I was personally fascinated by Kevin and Jay’s anecdotes harkening back to the (relatively) early days of the company. According to Kevin himself, it wasn’t too long ago that he was personally staying up late, trolling submissions for spam and other unacceptable content. Brad and I can certainly recount parallels to Ustream, perhaps with an even fresher memory. It is interactive townhalls like these that remind us that the websites we all know and love is not just an impersonal interface, but a construction of hardworking human beings doing their best to serve their diverse, passionate community.

I should also mention that Kevin and Jay make for an entertaining pair, even as they maneuvered through the technical minutiae of product development and user experience. We certainly look forward to more of Jay and Kevin on live broadcast!

Rest assured, Jay, Kevin and the rest of the Digg team have plenty more townhalls and meetups in store. Be sure to visit http://digg.com/townhallfor updates and video archives.

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